Sign Of The Swarm On Tour With Born Of Osiris…

Pittsburgh Deathcore legends and breakdown merchants, SIGNS OF THE SWARM, who are celebrating their decade of dominance with a completely sold-out US tour and a well-earned reputation for being Deathcore’s most ferocious live band are heading down under with Born Of Osiris this March. Bobby Crow (drummer) talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

Must be really exciting to be heading back to Australia to tour with Born Of Osiris March next year.
Yeah, yeah, it’s been quite a while.

Have you toured with those guys before?
Oh yeah, a couple times. The first time was actually before we were there last, that would’ve been late 2021, right after the pandemic. They’re very good friends of ours. They’re good folks, and I’m stoked to see them again.

How’s the touring been going? Sounds like 2025 was a massive year for the band.
I’m very grateful. We’re very fortunate to stay busy, and the shows keep coming, so we keep taking them. It’s been a very busy year, pretty much on the road for about six months or something like that. Busy, busy.

Did you get to stop for a break?
This is my favourite time of year, so I’m grateful to be home right now and see the family a bit. The more we tour, the more I’ve come to value that time.

Have you been really stoked with the reaction to the new album, To Rid Yourself of Truth?
Definitely. It felt like a long time in the making, and it’s cool. I’m always just grateful that people listen, you know? I really am. I never set expectations too high, if you want to check it out, that’s awesome, and if not, that’s fine too. And yeah, it seems to be doing really well. We mostly measure that by the tours we get, and the tours keep coming, and we’re staying busy, like I said, so that’s great.

Did you feel like this album really challenged the band in a lot of ways?
That’s a good question. I’d say the biggest challenge we always have is time, just because we’re so busy. It’s hard for us to really sit down and put all our creative energy into making an album, to carve out that space. So yeah, it’s challenging, not so much instrumentally, because we always try to push ourselves like anybody does, but more mentally and emotionally than physically, I’d say.

When you say emotionally, is that more of a sort of cathartic experience, that by the time you get to the end, you feel like you’ve kind of purged the soul in a lot of ways?
Yeah, it’s weird once it’s done, because right up until the last couple of days it feels like there’s still so much to do. Then all these little things come together really fast as you get close to the end, and suddenly you’re like, oh, I guess we’re done, right? We’re going home now. With our process, a lot of the mixing is done as we’re recording, so by the time we leave we’re already pretty close to the final product. So once we hit that point, it’s like, well, we need to sit on it for a bit, so we might as well get out of here. We’ve spent a month and a half in this box together, we need some clarity.

Is that when the real excitement happens, when you start seeing the songs actually come together, like you said, in the last few days, when it all just starts to slot into place?
Honestly, I think I’m most excited when we first get there. I start to hear things come together at the very beginning, hearing the sounds take shape. Then the tracking becomes the daunting part for me, because we usually have a pretty good idea of what we’re going to do before we go into the studio, most of it is already done. So yeah, it’s exciting to hear it all start coming together. By the time you get to the end, you’re tired and just pushing through the days, especially when we’re taking turns recording. You might have four or five days of just sitting there giving little bits of input, not really doing much of your own job.
So once we get to the end, especially for me with tracking drums, we knock all that out pretty quickly. The second half is usually pretty slow for me.

When you put the headphones on and listen to it at the end, does it kind of feel like a moment of triumph when you hear the final version?
For sure. We usually sit in a circle and turn it up really loud, and you start to hear everything come together. I think the most exciting part at the end is hearing the whole thing front to back in order. As we finish songs, we listen to them, and like I said, the mix is pretty much done by the time we finish tracking. But getting to hear it front to back, in the order we intended, is really cool. We like to write albums that have a flow, not just a bunch of upbeat singles, but something with movement. So hearing that movement for the first time is really exciting. It’s a very weird feeling to explain. It’s exciting to hear it, but it’s also like, oh wow, I guess we’re done. Everything just kind of falls away in that moment, all the stress and intensity. It’s just like, cool, guys. We did it.

Is that a really tricky balance being able to try and experiment with your sound, but still try and keep the identity of the band as well?
We actually had a lot of that on this record. Like I said, we didn’t have as much time to write as we wanted, but we tried a bunch of different things over the course of last year. Eventually we had a lot of different sounds and ideas, but only about seven or eight songs finished, and we were about a month out from going into the studio. So we kind of reverted back to writing a bunch of crazy, heavy music, and found moments to work those other ideas in. We spent a lot of time experimenting, probably too much, more than we should have, but it’s fun. It helps you think outside the box and gives you new ideas, instead of just hyper‑focusing on ‘this is what the band sounds like.’ It’s cool to just have fun and try finding different sounds.

With the guests that you had in (Will, Phil, Jack, and Johnny), were they obvious people to have involved in those particular songs, or were they earmarked for them at the early stages?
I think it started with Will. We’d talked to him, and he’d actually mentioned wanting to do something together at one point, so he was always at the top of the list. We knew we were going to make that happen. We ended up rewriting that song specifically for him, which was cool. A lot of times you write a song and think, ‘Oh, this person would sound cool on it,’ but this time we got to build it from the ground up with him in mind because we knew he wanted to be part of it. We tailored everything to him.

Phil was more of a natural fit, our singer is pretty good friends with him. We’re all friends, but those two talk the most, and having him on a track was a goal of ours. Getting him on a song was great, and it turned out so heavy and over the top. I think we really went all out on the feature songs on this album because it just felt exciting to tailor parts specifically for people. In the past, we’d write a song and then think, ‘Oh, it’d be cool to have this person on it,’ but actually knowing in advance that someone wants to do it and building that into the writing is really, really cool. And Jack and Johnny are great friends, having them involved was just nice.

Is that something you’re likely to do more of in the future, now that you’ve had a bit of a taste of it, and you’ve seen how well it has worked?
Yeah, probably. We always have a short list of people where we’re like, ‘We’ve got to get this guy, we’ve got to get that guy,’ or whatever. But with Jack, we really just wanted to have friends on that track. It had a broader lyrical message than a lot of our songs, more tied to real‑life stuff, the political climate and that kind of thing, which we don’t usually do. Both those guys are really keen and on the same page as us with that, so they were easy picks. We knew we wanted friends for that one. Honestly, this whole album was all friends. In the past, we’ve tried to reach for the stars and maybe missed a little, but it was cool this time to just bring in people we like and have known for a long time.

Are you playing most of these songs on tour, and in particular here in Australia?
We’ll be playing all the singles, and yeah, a lot of the new songs too. On the tour we’re about to do, I think we’re playing seven or eight songs off the album, and they’ve all been going over really well. We just played a bunch of them on our last two tours in the States, and we were in Europe a couple of months ago as well. It’s cool to see which songs hit harder with different crowds in different parts of the world, since we have a pretty broad spectrum of sounds for a heavy band. It’s interesting seeing what works in Europe versus here in the States. But the only way to find out is to play them and learn.

Do you have any predictions for Australia in terms of which ones they might resonate towards more?
I mean, y’all are crazy, so probably the heavy stuff, right? Probably, yeah. But generally we tend to know what people want to hear. We also tour with quite a few friends from down there, To The Grave, Thy Art Is Murder, and so on, so I’ve got a pretty good idea of what might be coming your way.

What do you look forward most to touring Australia?
I was there a couple of years ago and didn’t really get to do much. I went to a wildlife reserve in Brisbane, which was really nice, but aside from that I didn’t get to see anything. So I’m really hoping to explore more and actually take it in for what it is this time around. Last time it was gig to gig, not a lot of sleep, a rough schedule, lots of flying, one of the tougher tour experiences I’ve had, just from being exhausted and not getting to see much. But man, it’s a beautiful place. I remember waking up pretty much on the water one day and thinking, this is amazing. I like nature, and I like seeing things. I’d rather check out natural sights than spend time in a city. So whenever we do those drives in the middle of nowhere, that’s the stuff I like.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Signs Of The Swarm on tour with Born Of Osiris, tickets from The Phoenix…